Novice Digital Marketers Should Pay Attention To This Blog on Click Fraud Prevention..

If you are involved in digital marketing, such as search engine marketing (SEM) and social media marketing (SMM) to generate sales, you have probably encountered one way or another that your marketing campaign falls below your expectations along with key performance indicators.

There is certain amount of truth in business as the colloquial saying goes, “not every day is a Sunday”. But in the digital realm, every day can turn out to be black days if you are hounded by click fraud in marketing.

This is a particular genre of threats in cyberspace which largely affects digital marketing. The consequences result in whole loads of advertisers’ monies being sucked into digital blackholes.

In 2017, Procter & Gamble announced a US$2bil cut in marketing budget. In which, approximately US$500mil were for agency fees and US$1bil to media buy. According to their finance chief, one key reason was due to fake ad traffic generated by bots.

A similar story came out from Heineken, which had a budget of around US$150mil in the US market alone. 50% of that sum went to click fraud!

What is worst was actually that some of these ad spent went to popular platforms, such as Facebook, which they also acknowledged that some of their metrics presented were inaccurate and thus, gave wrong results to advertisers.

With such negativism, do you then stop your endeavours in SEM and SMM? Well, you could.

But if you are a believer that nothing is perfect in this world, including in the digital world, then read on…

As of now, the reality is that there are no sure-fire ways to stop click fraud. But there are steps you can take and try to minimise your ad spend wastage.

Below are some pointers to draw up your click fraud minimisation parameters…

· Cross reference with industry average for your business. This provides a benchmark in how to manage your own expectations. Discuss this with your digital agency but don’t leave everything to them. If you are an SME outsourcing digital marketing on a shoe-string, it is recommended to do some homework yourself

· If there are high number of clicks in your weekly report, compared to your prior benchmark research, your fraud detection antenna should be up. Find out the breakdown and granular specifications of where the clicks come from

· Don’t use the number of CTRs, Likes, Page Views or the likes to measure the success of your campaign. If you are in a B2B business, count on leads collection instead. This is by far the most reliable indicator

Do note that assessments on B2B and B2C digital marketing can be quite different. Do consult your digital agency for deeper discussion.